This is such a wonderful and creative idea.

Shahriar Asdollah-Zadeh, a New Zealand-based artist, has an art project called Little Man Protest, where, according to this interview by Isaac Hindin Miller, he “creates socially conscious and interactive artworks using audience participation through social networking mediums.”

More from Isaac’s interview on Shahriar’s project:

The Little Man Protest is inspired by previous artworks of mine from the World Art Collective where I used social networking to promote interactive artworks. This year I’m using Twitter and an online blog along with Facebook. The Little Man Protest is a series of miniature public sculptures. I wanted to take part in this miniature sculpture craze so I built these little red men, which are holding up signs of protest. They’re protesting about war and peace. The quote I’ve used is “When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace.” I wanted to stick them in very public places and so people either notice them or they don’t. If they do notice, I wanted that quote to plant a momentary seed in their chaotic day, to stop time just for a few seconds.

And later on there’s this little tidbit:

When the little men do get destroyed there’s a comical aspect to it, because when a protest ends it always leaves its mark, and with this artwork it leaves a physical mark because the feet of the little men are attached to the ground still, I’ve super glued them to the ground, so there’s a commemoration round the city where you’ll find little red feet.

As noted in the interview, the artist has set up a blog for the project, which includes this note:

Little man protest is about creating miniature style art in public spaces. In this instance they are tiny protestors commenting on the quote, “When a thought of War comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of Peace.” I used a quote of personal reflection with the aim of transforming daily thoughts of negativity into positive thoughts of social action and dialogue. The scale of the artwork has a humour element to it since they are tiny little red men. People vieiwing it may or may not take it seriously. But the message the artwork conveys with the quote is very real and that message is Peace…

I will be placing these sculptures in different places around Auckland City, New Zealand, over the next several weeks. I will be messaging people in real time through the process of text messaging to Twitter.com once the artwork is live and can be viewed. These artworks are meant to be a one day sculptural performance protest. And like all protests it can end with a positive note or a negative one depending on what the viewer takes from the quote.

Here’s a sample of the protest thus far:

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